Bulletin Board Listing Limits

[Floofenstein]

The Private Roleplayer Bulletin Board is really nice for finding people...Unfortunately, of late, people have been making a new thread for each individual idea they have...And are having rather a lot of ideas. This is...Annoying, as it leads to the first page being utterly dominated by three or four people who bump near every day it feels, leaving other advertisements buried down to the second page at the least, and who really even looks there?

Thusly I request enforcement of the guideline/rule under the Ecchidreams Terms of Service part 17, section 2: You must not spam multiple bulletins up in quick succession, and we advise against posting excessive bulletins anyway. 

And maybe make it a bit more stringent anyway, locked down to two or three threads at once. I love that people are having ideas, but I'd rather other peoples' bulletin adds, and my own, not be buried under them in the process.

[Mysthero]

I hate to sound like someone who complains but it is very disheartening when you post up a request and the next day 2 or 3 people have knocked your request to the next page because they each have posted somewhere between 3-5 requests all at once.

[Novaer]

I have taken a look into this, however realistically outside of manual moderation there's nothing automatic that I can do about this. The reason being is that IPS is rather limited in it's scope and we're not exactly using the feature in the way it was designed for. Something I hope to fix with our bespoke application. 

That said I can mitigate this; make it worthless to "Bump" the topic. Have the topics displayed in record creation order rather than update with new comments, thus posting "Bump" will do nothing. Sorry for the late response too.

[Floofenstein]

...Would that be every topic, or just the....Well, extraneous, far-too-many, that certain people keep posting? I don't think it'd be a proper fix if regular, not-completely-outnumbered threads were unable to be bumped, either. Really I think it'd actually make it worse, because evidently these terms of service-violating people have no problem spamming threads.

I didn't even think about nothing automatic....Makes sense, though.

...I don't quite understand the bespoke application bit, are you working on an update or something? hm.

And, of course, no worries about late replies, life and other things come first!

[Novaer]

I sincerely apologise once again for the late response.

On 22/11/2021 at 13:53, Floofenstein said:

...Would that be every topic, or just the....Well, extraneous, far-too-many, that certain people keep posting? I don't think it'd be a proper fix if regular, not-completely-outnumbered threads were unable to be bumped, either. Really I think it'd actually make it worse, because evidently these terms of service-violating people have no problem spamming threads.

Every topic within the Roleplayer Preferences and Private Roleplays area. Thing is you should only have one Roleplayer Preferences sheet, which you can link to your profile for ease-of-access. The Private Roleplayers thing is something you can link to in your About Me page for example. I'm also not sure what you mean by "Terms of Service violating" As far as I am aware there is no Terms of Service violation going on here what-so-ever as the sections aren't covered under the "double posting" rule, which I believe applies only to the forums. 

On 22/11/2021 at 13:53, Floofenstein said:

...I don't quite understand the bespoke application bit, are you working on an update or something? hm.

Bespoke - meaning completely custom. I am working with another roleplaying community in making a piece of web-software that is actually designed to do what we're trying to do here. Currently we use IPS (Invision Power Suite) which is fantastic community driven software, but we need to heavily customise it to suit our purposes. Up until around 2018-2019, this served us well. But we're starting to run into severe limitations that are imposed by the core of this software and we can't customise it any further to allow for the functionality that our Dreamers both need and deserve. The software is currently in active development right now and is in the Alpha stage. We have a roadmap of sorts and are currently working on the features. 

On 22/11/2021 at 13:53, Floofenstein said:

And, of course, no worries about late replies, life and other things come first!

Thank you for understanding, however you shouldn't need to wait several months for answers to simple questions. That is a failure on my part, and I can only apologise; again, for this error.

[Floofenstein]

Again, no worries. This is kinda unimportant, but, yeah. But thank you for replying!

It actually is in the terms of service, unless I'm misunderstanding it (Which I may be)...As my first post of this thread says, section seventeen, part 2: You must not spam multiple bulletins up in quick succession, and we advise against posting excessive bulletins anyway. 

Link to it in specific, I think: https://ecchidreams.com/rules/terms-of-service-r1#Section17

But, ah! So that's what bespoke means. Okay, thank you. I understand it'd be a massive pain to actually police, so if there's no workable automated system then it really probably isn't worth it simply on time alone...If sometihng is made, yay, if not...Well, I guess I can just hope for people to stop spamming and taking up half the front page all to themselves. It is nice to hear things are being worked on, though! Thank you very much, both for that and just...Hosting and running this site in general!

Edited May 4, 2022 by Floofenstein

[Novaer]

On 22/11/2021 at 13:53, Floofenstein said:

...Would that be every topic, or just the....Well, extraneous, far-too-many, that certain people keep posting? I don't think it'd be a proper fix if regular, not-completely-outnumbered threads were unable to be bumped, either. Really I think it'd actually make it worse, because evidently these terms of service-violating people have no problem spamming threads.

Ah, yes! You are actually correct about this. I was fixated on Section 12: Member Conduct: "Do not multi-post (the act of posting one after the other in a topic, for example; posting in a topic when you were the last to reply) within the main discussion forums." And I was focused on "Posts" or rather "Comments" that say "BUMP" and misinterpreted what you were saying. My bad.

But no; you're absolutely correct Section 17 - Paragraph 2 (Private Roleplays):

Quote

Private roleplays here on EcchiDreams usually refers to EcchiText Roleplays or EcchiChat Roleplays. They're not subject to staff moderation what-so-ever; however the Private Roleplay Bulletin Posts are. 

• Private Roleplay Bulletins are for EcchiText roleplays only; do not post other contact information to your topics. Contact information that leads away from EcchiDreams will be removed under Section 14 of the Terms of Service.
• You must not spam multiple bulletins up in quick succession, and we advise against posting excessive bulletins anyway. 
• You can request (via Report button) to have your topic removed for whatever reason.
• There is no moderation of EcchiText Roleplays outside of the bulletin board.

So as for "Bumping" their own Private Roleplay Bulletin (So just that one bulletin): There are no rules against this... Although arguably, their probably should be. When I've seen these "BUMP" posts they're usually spaced out days if not weeks after each other.

However spamming multiple private roleplay bulletins... Yeah-no. There are rules against that. But then what is "Quick Succession" to some people they might consider seconds. Some people might consider minutes. Hours. Days... We should probably look at making that more clear (We mean within an hour, which covers minutes and seconds too). I would suggest that if you see bulletin's popping up in a quick succession "As in multiple in the same thing in the space of an hour" please 'Report' these, and we'll sort that out, and advise the Dreamer in question that this is not acceptable under those Terms of Service. 

@Neptune is the person who focuses on this section of the site the most as I do more of the programming/backend stuff. So I'm going to tag her into this, and read over it. There is a chance I am misinterpreting things again, and she can obviously propose any changes needed to be made to the Terms of Service that can be voted on by the entire staff, before we can change anything. 

Thank you for bringing this to our attention though. If people are spamming multiple bulletins like this, this needs to be stopped.

[Floofenstein]

Oh, uh! Thank you. That explains that! Uh, yeah, thank you.

I'll make sure to report, then. I don't like being a bother, but...yeah. Uh...Well, thank you (again) for the response!

[Novaer]

You're very welcome. I can say at least from the feedback I've gotten from @Neptune that it's a moderation nightmare. We don't use templates usually for talking to Dreamers and sending messages to them. We type everything out so you can imagine why it'd be a pain in the backside to moderate it. That said, we should look into it.

Reporting - if anything - on the site would make things a lot easier for us, it's never a bother. It makes a special notification that says "Hey! I think you mods need to see this bullshit over here." Reports that aren't actionable get dismissed and those that are actionable are always - by policy - acted on. With having such limited resources in the staffing department; having more eyes on the stuff and having people report things to us, actually does genuinely help.

[Floofenstein]

That's actually really good to know. I've been refraining from doing anything because...well, I know there's not a lot of staff, so more work is less good. Felt guilty about making this thread at all, honestly.

So, will do!